'Gandhi is more relevant than Marx today'

Historian Bipan Chandra, has recently co-edited, a 10-volume series on Modern Indian History.

| May 4, 2006, 12.00 AM IST

Historian Bipan Chandra, 77, is well known for his writings on Indian national movement and communalism. He has recently co-edited, along with fellow historians Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, a 10-volume series on Modern Indian History, published by Sage. Chandra talks to Avijit Ghosh:

What are these 10 volumes all about?

They are thoroughly resear-ched works on different facets of modern Indian history. For instance, Salil Mishra, who writes on politics in UP from 1937-39, explains how and why Muslim League grew from a liberal, communal organisation to one espousing the two-nation theory from 1937 onwards.

Often we come across the view that if Congress had formed a coalition government with Muslim League in UP, Partition wouldn't have happened. We have tried to answer this question too. Rakesh Batabyal's book deals with communalism in Bengal from 1943 to 47.

Without soft-peddling the issue, he shows how Gandhi tried to tackle the problem in Noahkhali. Similarly, Sucheta Mahajan discusses why Gandhi did not start a movement against Partition. These books raise nagging questions and also try to answer them.

Is there a specific idea behind publishing these volumes?

Overall this series shows that the Indian national movement needs to be studied as a mass movement. The colonial view is that it was a movement of the elites. The subalterns say that the people's movement was different from the national movement.

Our understanding is that the national movement accommo-dated different points of view. Warts and all, it was a broad-based, mass movement with many ideological strands. How-ever, these strands also occasionally clashed with each other. Through this series, we have tried to understand modern India: how we are what we are today.

We wanted to create a series outside the stream of colonial writing and post-modernist writing. To this end, we started out with manuscripts already available. Nine volumes are out and the tenth will be published shortly. Probably, at a later date, we will come out with 10 more volumes.

You have written on modern India: on communalism, on Nehru. What next?

I am working on two books. I want to write a biography of Bhagat Singh and on the relevance of Gandhi today. I believe that Marx was the greatest thin-ker of modern times. Because he was able to analyse the weakness of capitalist society: economi-cally, socially, politically and culturally.

But the big question is: how to change the society. Gandhi was able to evolve a way of organising and mobilising people for change. He is a theoretician on how to bring about social change. That is why Gandhi is more relevant than Marx today.

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